Summer People (6 page)

“Yeah, I'm sure I did. She's not big on long conversations anymore, though. I'm sure if I did, she just looked at me or something.”

“Why didn't you come up here with her?”

“Because I'm working on my photographs. I've got my own shit to do here.”

Nathan paused. “Well, why didn't Dora come up here?”

Dora was Ellen's live-in cook in Cleveland. She had interrupted Nathan's meeting with Ralph and Ellen by screaming so shrilly the hair stood up on the back of his neck. When Ralph and Nathan had raced
toward the kitchen, they found that Ralph's pet boa constrictor had escaped from his bedroom, coiling itself behind the refrigerator.

Ralph said, “She's a middle-aged black woman with kids.”

Nathan listened to Ralph turning on a television and changing the channels. “Well, I just wish somebody had told me about this before I came up here.”

“About the deal with the car?” Ralph asked. “Yeah. How come your dad didn't tell you about it?”

“Well, because he's her estate planner. He doesn't know that much about her personal life.”

A silence followed, and Nathan couldn't tell if Ralph was still mulling the situation over or was just engrossed by something on television.

“Yeah, you know what, though?” Ralph said, suddenly. “It's not even that big of a deal. She just kind of forgets things every once in a while. I think that's what happened with the car, you know? She just forgot where she was going, or how to drive it, or something. But with you driving, I don't think you have anything to worry about.”

Nathan wondered whether there was any point in asking the questions he wanted to ask. What if she forgets that red coils on the stove mean they're hot, for instance? Or takes a walk and forgets the way home? What if Nathan was a former part-time librarian and deep sleeper, not a goddamned registered nurse?

Instead he listened to Ralph inviting himself up to Brightonfield Cove. “It won't be for a while,” he said, his voice increasing in volume as he moved back into the room where people were attempting to shout over the music. “Like in a couple of weeks or something. Just for a few days. I've got to visit a friend in Portland, and I figured why not spend a few days in the Cove just relaxing, you know?”

Hope at the Post Office ~ Eldwin Gives Nathan a Lift ~ An Old Video Conjures the Past ~ Glen's Request ~ The Cocktail Party ~ A Marriage Proposal

I
n the morning, Nathan awoke to the sound of pounding on the front door. He pulled on a pair of shorts, stumbled down the front stairs, and opened the door to find a sinewy woman in cargo pants and a yellow T-shirt carrying a bucket and sponge. She smiled primly as she entered, pretending not to notice Nathan's bed head, and in return Nathan pretended not to notice that she'd nearly beaten the door off its frame.

“You called Monday saying,” she looked down at her clipboard, “Eleanor Broderick wanted a bath this morning.”

Nathan noticed the nurse's badge clipped to the woman's pocket, nodded, and said, “That's right.” Back home, Ralph had told him that Ellen employed a nursing service in Cleveland to help her bathe, so Nathan had scanned the local yellow pages to find someone to do the same for her here.

After introducing the nurse to Ellen, he guided them upstairs to the bathroom, then told them he'd be back in half an hour. The sky was a
threatening concrete slab, but Nathan wanted a little exercise, so he decided to walk the quarter-mile to Gilman's grocery. Since the weather would likely keep them from the club, Nathan picked up a few videos and another two-liter bottle of soda. On his way out, he glanced over at the people trickling in and out of the post office.

There was no urgent reason to check the mail that morning, except that Nathan was hoping for another letter from Sophie. It was possible, after all, that after mailing her last letter she'd been stricken with regret and self-doubt. Maybe her new, knuckle-dragging boyfriend had come over afterward and compelled her to wonder—as Nathan did—why she'd ever started dating him. Later that night, she might have cried and pulled out her pink stationery to write a new letter. A letter asking Nathan to love her again and pleading with him to return.

That was the welcome missive that could be waiting in Ellen's post office box. Except that it wasn't. And Nathan knew it wasn't. And going over there to find the box empty except for Pizza Hut and grocery coupons would only plunge him deeper into his current gloom.

Unless, of course, the letter was there.

Nathan ambled across the street, assuring himself that he was only going to check the box for Ellen's mail. He'd been neglectful of this part of his job and now he was going to be more conscientious. An attractive, freckle-faced young woman smiled at Nathan as he opened the post office door, and he felt a surge of optimism about finding a letter from Sophie. Then he got himself under control. He forced himself to confront the fact that no letter from her would be there, and when he opened the box, finding it barren, he was for the most part prepared for the hollow tightening inside him.

 

R
ain spat against Nathan's face. A few women chirped happily on the front porch of Gilman's, and a handsome thirtysomething couple, huddled beneath an umbrella, seemed amused by the weather and laughingly wished Nathan a good morning. Nathan nodded almost imperceptibly. He debated whether it was worth the trouble of setting down his bag
of groceries to unzip the hood of his windbreaker and prevent the rain from dripping down the back of his neck. But he did not stop. The windy rain lashed against his eyes while, behind him, a car's tires hissed against the wet pavement.

“You want a ride?” said a man, speaking through a narrow opening in the window of his rusty station wagon. Squinting to see through the rain, Nathan could make out a wide, big-boned face that took him a moment to recognize. Instead of a pastoral robe, Eldwin was wearing an army green sweater, and although Nathan hesitated, fearful of being trapped in a dully pious conversation, he accepted the offer and trudged to the other side of the car.

“I'm probably getting your seat a little wet,” Nathan said, arranging his bag of groceries on top of the heap of old mail and newspapers beneath his feet. But the more he took in his surroundings, the more his concern seemed superfluous. Cottony stuffing pushed out between the seams of stained, tan upholstery, and the air was acrid with the smell of cigarette butts overflowing their tray.

Eldwin said, “Ah, don't worry about it.” He wasn't wearing his round, wire-rimmed glasses, but indentations remained along his temple where the sides of the frames normally squeezed his broad head. “How are things going with Mrs….”

“Broderick?”

“Yeah.”

“Things are going all right, I guess.”

“That's good. I'd heard she wasn't doing so well lately.”

“Where did you hear that?”

Eldwin tilted his chin up to scratch his neck. “I think that was on the boat yesterday, people were saying that. I saw you down there, didn't I? At the yacht club?”

Nathan gave a grim smile and said, “Well, someone invited me to go sailing, but it turned out she thought I was somebody else, so I didn't go.”

“Who invited you?”

“Ellen's niece, Kendra…Garfield, I think.”

Eldwin drove the car down to Ellen's driveway and parked behind the nurse's black Escort. A dimpled smile crept across his unshaven face as he stared out the window at the dense, brainlike clouds now looming over the ocean.

“Do you know her?” Nathan asked.

“No, I
didn't
know her, but she invited my kids and me to go out sailing with them yesterday, so I guess you would have been with us. Who did she think you were?”

“I don't know. The son of a family friend or something.” Nathan shrugged. “Anyway, you went with them? How was it?”

“Well…actually…it was pretty nice.” Eldwin inhaled deeply and exhaled with an embarrassed laugh.

Nathan stared out the window at the leafy tree boughs bending away from the ocean. He was enjoying the unexpected company and was in no hurry to go back into the house. Eldwin removed a pack of American Spirits from above the visor and pushed in the car lighter. “So you don't have much time off with this job?”

“Well, the job description's kind of vague,” Nathan explained. “I had some stressful stuff going on back home, and I kind of thought I would come up here and just drive Ellen around and stuff, but also kind of relax and clear my head and…” Nathan stared out the window. “I don't know. You're right that she's not in the best shape, so I might have my hands full.”

Eldwin nodded as he slapped the pack of cigarettes against his palm.

“So what's your arrangement here?” Nathan asked.

“My arrangement? Well, St. Michael's provides the house and in return I'm supposed to be the pastor there until Labor Day.”

“I liked your sermon on Sunday.”

“Yeah? I wasn't sure whether to give that one.”

“How come?”

“I don't know. I borrowed from Emerson, which should have appealed to some of their New England sensibilities, but it was a little heavy on the Aristotle. I just doubt it was the kind of sermon they were expecting.”
Eldwin stuck a cigarette in his mouth and shrugged as he reached for the lighter. “Who knows?”

“Well, I thought it was better than a lot of sermons I hear.”

“Do you hear a lot of sermons?” Eldwin asked. He lit his cigarette and exhaled a thin stream of smoke through the open window.

“I used to,” Nathan said. “But I imagine I'll be hearing your sermons fairly regularly.”

“We'll see. They might tell me to get lost.”

Nathan said, “Seems like a pretty good gig if you can keep it.”

“Yeah,” Eldwin said, slowly, as if uncertain whether to affirm that this was true. “Giving one sermon a week, a lot of them sermons I've already given, is not a heavy workload. But we have Meghan and Eliot, with none of their friends around or normal places to take them. And we have to figure out how to deal with having a nanny living with us.”

“You've never had a nanny before?”

Eldwin shook his head, coughing without opening his mouth, a few bursts of smoke escaping his bulbous nose. “No, have you?”

“No, but yours makes me think it might be nice to have one.”

Eldwin glanced at Nathan, chuckled, then sighed. “Yeah. She's attractive.”

Lightning stabbed across the charcoal sky, and the sudden crack and roar of thunder made the car tremble.

“Whoa,” Nathan said.

The wind keened louder through the window and rain began to fall in dull plunks against the windshield, blurring the gray waves of the ocean. “All right, I should probably head in here,” Nathan said, reaching down for his grocery bag. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Hey, do you know if Ellen got an invitation to a party tonight?” Eldwin asked.

“She's invited to Bill McAlister's party.”

“Are you going to go?”

“Ellen may, but I don't know. I may end up dropping her off or something.”

Eldwin's brow furrowed, but the rain drummed on the car's roof like thousands of impatient fingers. Flicking his cigarette out the window, he called, “Try and come. I'll bring Leah along.”

Nathan nodded, then got out of the car and hurried across the puddled lawn. He clamped the newspaper over his head, but by the time he reached the porch, his windbreaker was soaked and hanging from him like an old person's skin.

 

“D
o you know what this is, Ellen?” Nathan was crouching beside the TV stand. He'd planned to pop the movie
Chariots of Fire
into the VCR but had noticed an old shoe box on the bottom shelf. Ellen was distracted by the view outside the French doors, so Nathan opened the box and found within it an old Audubon bird guide, a pair of binoculars, and a videocassette entitled “1936–1957.” Nathan held the cassette up for her to see and read the title aloud.

“Old movies?” she said. She was sitting with her feet up in her lounge chair, looking more vital since her bath. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was dressed in a cotton khaki-colored dress.

“Do you want to check it out?”

Ellen looked down at the tape. “I don't see why not.”

The video slid into the machine with a series of rough clicks, as if something had broken inside, but after a moment, the static screen was replaced by darkness and funky, seventies music that Nathan associated with old porno films. Seized with the sudden dread that Ralph might have left an old X-rated movie among Ellen's birdwatching materials, Nathan kept his hand close to the stop button of the VCR. He waited, half expecting to see a well-muscled and mustachioed man bumping behind a chesty blonde, but as the screen brightened, Nathan sat back and relaxed.

It was an old black-and-white film, perhaps shot in sixteen millimeter, because the gray snow was falling more quickly than it does in real life. Occasionally mottled with dark splotches and squiggles, the screen showed an imposing brick house sitting on top of a snow-covered hill.

“Isn't that your place in Cleveland?” Nathan asked.

Ellen's right hand fumbled against the side of the recliner, searching for the lever to push her upright and make it easier for her to see. Nathan scooted over to assist her as a boy appeared onscreen, running and diving headfirst onto his rail sled to careen the rest of the way down the hill.

“That's Tommy, my brother,” Ellen said.

“Oh, does he still live in Cleveland, too?”

“No, he was hit by a car.”

“Oh.”

The boy stood up from his sled. He grinned through crooked teeth and licked at the snow accumulated around the woolen collar of his coat. Crouching to paw at the ground, he found the rope attached to his sled, then ran in short, high-stepping strides back up the hill. Near the rear porch of the house, he flopped down on his back, lying motionless, his tongue lolling out in mock death. Then he opened his laughing eyes and waved his arms and legs against the snow. When he finished, he rolled over to view the angel shape he'd made, then packed a few snowballs to hurl at the round-faced girl on the porch. The girl turned, wearing a shapeless dark coat that barely trembled as the white clumps hit her back and fell away.

“Is that you?” Nathan asked.

Ellen didn't hear him, but when the girl faced her brother, her nose wrinkling in amused protest, Nathan did not need to ask the question again.

Moments later, decades passed into a world of color, and Ellen appeared in the style that she would settle into for the rest of her life. Her hair was parted on the side and pulled back, and she was dressed in a button-down, calf-length summer dress. She stood with arms crossed amid dozens of others on the grass bank of the cove that connected through a narrow strait with Albans Bay. A banner flapping between two poles on the shore read “1957 Father-Son Dinghy Derby,” and a row of dinghies in the water huddled along the embankment, a man and boy in each one. The young Ellen took a few steps down the sloping grass and crouched beside a red-and-black dinghy named the
Little Red Hen.
On the seat, a towheaded boy sat running his hand through the water beside his father. The little
boy continued to stare down at the water, answering his mother's questions until he looked up and smiled as she backed away.

“Is that your son, Glen?” Nathan asked.

“Yes, and his father, Harold.”

Dressed in white pants and a short-sleeved oxford shirt, Harold seemed not to have noticed that his wife had knelt down beside the boat. He was a slender, athletic-looking man, with the kind of square jaw and closely cropped hair that Nathan thought of as classic 1950s handsome. He was talking with a husky man onshore whose facial expressions seemed over-eager. The man had thinning blond hair and laughed at moments when Harold only smiled.

“Is that what's his name…Carl?”

“I think so.”

Farther up the shore, an old, barrel-chested man in suspenders held a pistol above his head. He shouted something before the gun jerked and a wisp of smoke curled and vanished into the air.